<h2 class="heading-lg">SkyBlueCanvas v1.1 Beta Updates</h2><p>
We had planned an incremental release numbered vBeta 1.1 but after a
lot of bug fixes and adding several new features, we decided that
this release merited a minor release number. A lot of work went into
improving the over-all usability of SkyBlueCanvas in this release.
We also fixed a lot of bugs that had previously escaped our attention.
</p><h3 class="heading-lg">Data Integrity</h3><p>
The changes in v1.1 will not affect your existing data at all.
We did not make any changes to the data storage. There were
changes to the logic in a few of the plugins and modules but
these changes should not impact the display of the plugin
or module output.
</p><h3 class="heading-lg">New SkyBlueCanvas Features</h3><p>
The most visible change in SkyBlueCanvas v1.1 is to the Page Manager including the ability to publish Collections from from the page level rather than a separate manager.
The new Page Manager has three tabs: Article Text, Meta Data and
Collections. When you create or edit a page, you can now select
the collections to appear on that page and the region in which each
collection should appear. This is a much more intuitive approach.
We have, however, kept the Collections Publishing Manager in place
for the time-being so the impact of the change will be less drastic.
</p><p>
The Page Manager also includes a Meta Description field for better
seach engine optimization. You can still create Meta Groups and
apply them to multiple pages but the meta data that is logically
part of a single page is now included in the Page Manager.
</p><p>
The Page Manager, as well as many other Managers now has the ability
to re-order items from the default list view so you do not need to
open the editor to change the order of an item. Simply use the up
and down arrows in the list view.
</p><p>
We also updated WYMeditor, the XHTML Editor in SkyBlueCanvas
to WYMeditor v0.5.
</p><p>
We also added the ability to publish and un-publish pages and other
items from the default list view with a single button click. In addition,
you can now enable and disable plugins, gadgets, banner ads and site
metrics with the click of a button.
</p><p>
You can now add page-specific JavaScript files to your skins. For instance,
if you have a layout skin named skin.alternate.html, you can add a JavaScript
file that only loads on this page by creating a file named
skin.alternate.js in /skyblue_root/data/skins/your_skin/js/.
</p><p>
We added improvements to the plugin code for class-based plugins.
The code previously would create a new instance of the class for
each invocation of the plugin within a page. We changed the code
to keep track of the plugin classes on a page and only instantiates
them once. This saves overhead and allows the constructor to be used
to initialize (or load from files/DB) data that is used in subsequent
invocations. This may break existing class based plugins but this
memory-management was a necessary change.
</p><p>
We also added a new Banner Ads Manager so you can place banner ads
through the Admin Console. Previously banner ads were required to
be added via FTP only.
</p><h3 class="heading-lg">For Developers</h3><p>
SkyBlueCanvas has several major changes to the code that will interest
developers. We added 3 new classes to the <acronym title="Object Oriented Programming">OOP</acronym> hierarchy: SkyBlueObject,
Observer and SkyBlueError. These classes add some default shared
functionality in getters and setters and most importantly add support
for custom events using the Observer Pattern. We will provide full
documentation for using custom events and the other new classes as
soon as possible.
</p><p>
Developers will also notice that we have done a lot of clean-up on
the code by moving a lot of fuctionality that was previously built
into the system core into external plugins. Future releases of
SkyBlueCanvas will do even more in this area to help lighten
the base code even more.
</p><h3 class="heading-lg">How To Upgrade From Previous Versions of SkyBlueCanvas</h3><p>
The upgrade instructions can be found on the <a href="http://blog.skybluecanvas.com/skybluecanvas-lightweight-cms/upgrading-skybluecanvas/">SkyBlueCanvas Blog</a>.
</p>